Is Stephen Harper's Conservative minority
government supporting another
Oil War? This would yield enormous profits for greed-driven
investors, and the atmosphere will continue to
dangerously heat from the increasing use of those
fossil fuels.

by David Michael Smith

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, President Bush declared that the United
States would launch a "War on Terrorism." In early
October, U.S. airplanes began bombing Afghanistan and
providing assistance to the Northern Alliance and
other groups opposed to the Taliban regime. Within a
few months, U.S. troops and their Afghan allies had
succeeded in ousting the Taliban and installing a new
regime. Although Osama bin Laden and his top
lieutenants apparently escaped, U.S. officials
proclaimed that a significant blow had been dealt to
the al-Qa'ida network.

Traumatized and outraged by the horrific events of
September 11, the majority of Americans supported the
war in Afghanistan. Most people believed the U.S.
Commander-in-Chief when he said that the replacement
of the Taliban regime was required to safeguard our
country against another catastrophic attack by
al-Qa'ida forces. Even Princeton Professor Richard
Falk, a longtime anti-war activist, wrote in The
Nation ("Defining a Just War," Oct. 29, 2001)
that the war in Afghanistan was "the first truly just
war since World War II." But was it?

Since last October, thousands of people have
participated in anti-war rallies, marches, and
teach-ins in New York City, Washington, San Francisco,
Houston, and other cities. People opposed to the war
have made clear that they condemn the atrocity of
September 11. But they also condemn the U.S. role in
the deaths of thousands of Afghan people who had
nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon.

In the British Guardian
("The innocent dead in a coward's war," Dec. 20,
2001), journalist Seumas Milne estimated that about
ten thousand Afghan soldiers may have died in the war
and cited University of New Hampshire Professor Marc
Herold's estimate that about four thousand civilians
have also died.

Moreover, anti-war activists and progressive writers
argue that the war in Afghanistan has been, in large
part, another "oil war." The September 11 attacks
provided a compelling pretext for military action
against the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan. But a
growing body of research by journalists and scholars
reveals that the Bush Administration's decision in
favour of a regime change and all-out war in
Afghanistan was significantly influenced by the desire
to install a new government that would be more
sympathetic to U.S. economic interests in Central
Asia.

Has Prime Minister Harper risked the lives of Canadians for an "Oil War" in Afghanistan under the guise of a "War on Terrorism"?

Although Afghanistan itself has no significant oil or
natural gas reserves, it is strategically located in a
region which does. As Eric Margolis observed in the
Toronto Sun ("The U.S. is Determined to Dominate
the World's Richest New Source," Jan. 13, 2002),
Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the
former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikstan,
Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, is the
world's "richest new source of oil." In the Jurist
("The Deadly Pipeline War," Dec. 8, 2001),
Marjorie Cohn noted that some analysts have estimated
the potential value of Caspian oil and natural gas
reserves at four trillion dollars. Phil Gasper
recalled in the Socialist Worker ("The
Politics of Oil," Jan. 25, 2002) that the Middle
East Economic Digest editors have described
Central Asia as "the Middle East of the twenty-first
century."

Even if this latter projection proves overly
optimistic, Martha Hamilton concluded in a
Washington Post article ("The Last Great Race
For Oil Reserves," April 26, 1998) that the "largely
untapped subterranean treasure" in the Caspian Basin
may be "the third-largest reserve in the world, after
the Persian Gulf and Siberia."

This planned pipeline would carry $3-5
trillion in oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea
basin via Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan,
where ships docked in Arabian Sea ports.

As Hamilton wrote, "The possibility of bringing those
huge energy reserves to market has touched off a
scramble by international oil and gas companies to get
in on what may be one of the world's last great energy
plays." As Cohn pointed out in "The Deadly Pipeline
War," Dick Cheney, then chief executive officer of the
energy company Halliburton, told a meeting of oil
industry leaders in 1998: "I can't think of a time
when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become
as strategically significant as the Caspian."

U.S. government officials and energy company
executives have been anxious to exploit what Daniel
Yergin, renowned energy expert and author of The
Prize (1993), has called "the number-one prize in
world oil." However, the transportation of oil and
natural gas extracted from the region has posed a
serious challenge for them. The Caspian Pipeline
Consortium, led by the Chevron Corporation, opened a
new oil pipeline from Kazakhstan to Russia in October,
2001. But, as George Monbiot reported in the
Guardian ("America's pipe dream," Oct. 23,
2001), policymakers in Washington have generally
opposed the construction of pipelines through Russia
or Iran. This is why U.S. energy companies and
government officials have been so interested in
Afghanistan.
As Ahmed Rashid explained in his book, Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central
Asia (2001), U.S. policy toward Afghanistan during
the past decade has been largely driven by corporate
interests in the region's resources. Rashid noted that
in 1995, the California-based UNOCAL Corporation began
negotiating with the government of Turkmenistan to
build oil and gas pipelines from that country through
Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea.
Soon after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in
1996, UNOCAL executives initiated discussions with
them in order to secure the pipeline agreement.

According to Rashid, the Taliban's religious
fundamentalism and harsh repression precluded normal
diplomatic relations at the time but did not pose an
insurmountable obstacle to a potential business deal.
Strikingly, neither did the relocation of Osama bin
Laden and numerous al-Qa'ida fighters to Afghanistan
in 1996 and 1997. As Rashid recounted, UNOCAL Vice
President Marty Miller and other company executives
even wined and dined Taliban representatives in
Houston in November 1997. Mullah Mohammed Ghaus and
his Afghan colleagues stayed at an expensive hotel and
visited the Houston Zoo and the NASA Space Center
during their visit. Miller offered the Taliban
representatives a lucrative contract and thought a
formal agreement was imminent.

The Clinton Administration quietly supported UNOCAL's
efforts, but these negotiations eventually failed.
Taliban leaders finally decided against the pipeline
deal, and Washington's willingness to do business with
them ended after the al-Qa'ida bombings of U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. President
Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on al-Qa'ida
training camps in Afghanistan and even authorized
efforts to assassinate bin Laden. At the same time,
the U.S. tried to persuade Taliban officials to
surrender bin Laden. As Monbiot has noted,
notwithstanding these developments, U.S. business
executives and government officials remained deeply
interested in the potential of oil and gas pipelines
through Afghanistan.

In May 2001, the mainstream media widely reported that
the new U.S. Bush Administration had awarded the
Taliban regime forty-two million dollars to support
the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan.
Less well known is the fact that, shortly after taking
office, the Bush Administration had quietly resumed
negotiations with the Taliban. In an important new
book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth (2001), French
authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie
have revealed that the Bush Administration worked long
and hard to "decouple" bin Laden from the Taliban and
lay the foundations for U.S. diplomatic recognition
and pipelines for oil and natural gas.

Brisard and Dasquie have drawn on numerous sources,
including discussions with John O'Neill, the former
FBI Deputy Director who retired in July 2001.
Ironically, O'Neill then became security director for
the World Trade Center, where he died in the September
11 attacks. According to the authors, O'Neill resigned
from the FBI because the State Department had
continually blocked his investigation into al-Qa'ida's
roots in Saudi Arabia. The authors report that O'Neill
bitterly complained about the ability of the U.S. oil
companies and their State Department allies to thwart
an investigation that might offend the Saudi royal
family and jeopardize U.S. economic interests in that
country.

Brisard and Dasquie's account of the negotiations
between the Bush Administration and the Taliban
between February and August 2001, provides a helpful
framework for understanding the eventual U.S. decision
to topple the Afghan regime after the tragedy of
September 11. The authors have explained that
Washington saw the Taliban as a potential partner who
could provide stability in Afghanistan and benefit
from the construction of pipelines by U.S.
corporations. But, in a series of meetings in
Washington, Islamabad, and Berlin, U.S. officials
demanded that the Taliban surrender bin Laden and
invite other Afghan political forces to join their
government.

When the Taliban equivocated over and eventually
refused these demands, U.S. officials threatened to
take military action against them. As Brisard revealed
in an interview in Paris, at one point in the
negotiations, these officials told the Taliban,
"Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or
we bury you under a carpet of bombs." As Jonathan
Steele and his colleagues reported in the Guardian
("Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks
before NY attack," Sept. 22, 2001), U.S.
representatives told Russian, Iranian, and Pakistani
diplomats at a mid-July meeting in Berlin that
Washington was seriously contemplating this option.
Although these U.S. officials have since denied making
such a threat, former Pakistan Foreign Minister Niaz
Naik, who was present at the meeting, confirmed their
remarks in an interview with the Guardian reporters.
Is it a coincidence that the deadliest terrorist
attacks in U.S. history occurred just several weeks
after negotiations with the Taliban broke down?
Perhaps. But Brisard and Dasquie have speculated that
the prospect of U.S. military action against
Afghanistan may have led bin Laden to approve the
massive assault on New York City and Washington.
Similarly, Steele and his colleagues have raised the
possibility that bin Laden "was launching a preemptive
strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats."
Other analysts have suggested that bin Laden may have
authorized such a "preemptive strike" because he
feared that the Taliban might finally accede to
Washington's demands and try to force him to leave
Afghanistan.

Although such speculation cannot be confirmed, it
seems clear that long-standing U.S. economic interests
in pipeline construction played a major role in the
U.S. government's decision in favor of a regime change
and all-out war in Afghanistan. Notably, as Shaun
Casey emphasized in the Boston Globe ("Ethics
of This War Have Yet to be Spelled Out," Oct. 11,
2001) and Stephen Zunes pointed out in the San Jose
Mercury News (" U.S. Military Response is Wrong --
And It Won't Work," Oct. 12, 2001), there has never
been any evidence of the Taliban regime's involvement
in the attacks on the U.S. As John Pilger remarked in
the British Daily Mirror ("Hidden Agenda Behind
War on Terror," Oct. 29, 2001), the Bush
Administration knew well before the Pentagon's first
bombs began falling on Afghanistan that the attacks of
September 11 were planned in Britain and the United
States, and that none of the actual perpetrators were
Afghan nationals.

As Howard Zinn observed in The Progressive ("A
Just Cause, Not a Just War," December 2001), the U.S.
government rejected the alternative of turning to
international law, diplomacy, and limited
multinational military action in order to bring
al-Qa'ida forces to justice. As Zinn has noted, the
U.S. government also rejected the Taliban regime's
offer to surrender bin Laden for trial in a third
country after receiving evidence of his involvement in
the September 11 atrocity. As Phil Gasper wrote in
the International Socialist Review
("Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the
Taliban," November-December 2001), the Bush
Administration's refusal to seriously consider these
options revealed that the overthrow of the Taliban and
the installation of a new, more business-friendly
regime had already been designated as primary
objectives of the impending war.
In his book Resource Wars: The New Landscape of
Global Conflict (2002), Professor Michael Klare
of Hampshire College has acknowledged that one purpose
of "Operation Enduring Freedom" was to "capture and
punish those responsible for the September 11
attacks." But Klare has explained that a second
objective was "to consolidate U.S. power in the
Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure
continued flow of oil." As Klare has emphasized, while
this latter objective "may get far less public
attention than the first, this does not mean it is any
less important."

In a report released just days before the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S.
Energy Information Administration described
Afghanistan as a significant "potential transit route
for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to
the Arabian Sea." However, the report noted that the
potential construction of oil and natural gas
pipelines has "been undermined by Afghanistan's
instability." As Monbiot has written, "Given that the
U.S. government is dominated by former oil industry
executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such
plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking."
Indeed, the way in which the Bush Administration
sought to "capture and punish" the al-Qa'ida forces in
Afghanistan was significantly influenced by its
commitment to promoting U.S. economic interests and
power in the region.

Gore Vidal argues in his book entitled, Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace (2002), that the drive
for profits and power are central to the Bush
Administration's so-called "War on Terrorism." Vidal
writes, "We need Afghanistan because it's the gateway
to Central Asia, which is full of oil and natural
gas... That's what it's all about. We are establishing
our control over Central Asia."

Many Americans may not want to believe that such
economic motives could play so important a role in
U.S. foreign policy. But developments in the aftermath
of the war in Afghanistan make it difficult to deny
journalists Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer's
observation that "War is politics by other means, and
politics is business, and oil is very big business."

As Hightower and Frazer concluded in their book The
Hightower Lowdown (January, 2002), the tragedy of
September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan
"put the U.S. pipeline plans back on track." Hightower
and Frazer cited a remarkable article in the Pakistani
Frontier Post (Oct. 10, 2001). This article
reported that, though the U.S. war against the Taliban
had barely begun, U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain
had already informed the Pakistan government that, "in
view of recent geopolitical developments," the
negotiations for a pipeline through Afghanistan would
be revived.

After the Taliban regime collapsed, the Bush
Administration hand-picked Hamid Karzai to head the
new Afghan government and named Zalmay Khalilzad, an
Afghan-American, as its new special envoy to the
Karzai government. As Richard Neville pointed out in
the Australian Sydney Morning Herald ("Beyond
Good and Evil," April 15, 2002), both Karzai and
Khalilzad are former consultants to UNOCAL. Eric
Margolis has disclosed in the Toronto Sun
("America's New War: A Progress Report," Dec. 9, 2001)
that Karzai is also a former "asset" for the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency. As Salim Muwakkil wrote
in the Chicago Tribune ("Pipeline Politics
Taint U.S. War," March 18, 2002), the "rise to power"
of these two former UNOCAL employees will "make things
even smoother" for the resumption of the pipeline
project in Afghanistan.
As Daniel Fisher reported in Forbes Magazine
(Feb. 4, 2002), "It has been called the pipeline from
hell, to hell, through hell" but "now, with the
collapse of the Taliban, oil executives are suddenly
talking again about building it." To be sure, the
giant U.S. energy corporations are unlikely to make
major investments in the project until the new Afghan
regime proves able to suppress the outbreaks of
violence among the various warlords' forces and any
military challenge from resurgent Taliban fighters.
This is certainly one reason why U.S. and British
troops in Afghanistan are struggling to piece together
a viable Afghan national army that can defend the new
regime.

In the meantime, Karzai has already made clear that
his government fully intends to work closely with
neighboring countries and U.S. oil companies to reap
the immense profits from the transport of Caspian
Basin oil and natural gas. On Feb. 8, 2002, Karzai
visited Pakistan and joined with General Pervez
Musharraf in pledging "mutual brotherly relations" and
cooperation "in all spheres of activity." As the
Irish Times reported on Feb. 11, 2002, Karzai
announced that he and Musharraf had discussed the
proposed Central Asian pipeline project "and agreed
that it was in the interest of both countries."

The mounting U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and
other Central Asian countries may enable Chevron,
Exxon-Mobil, UNOCAL, and other giant corporations to
lay claim to "the number-one prize in world oil." But
the extension of U.S. military power and economic
domination into this region comes with very grave
risks. As hundreds of millions of people in Central
Asia and the Middle East watch their oil and natural
gas being extracted and transported for the profit of
Western companies, the prospects for a massive,
violent backlash against the U.S. and its client
regimes are likely to grow. As horrific as the
September 11 attacks were, they may only be the
beginning.